A journey to remove the question mark

Monthly Archives: January 2013

All of my life I have considered myself to be an emotional person, I FEEL everything. I cry at commercials, I sympathize with the old man eating at a restaurant by himself, I get angry at bullies. I think having such emotional depth has really let me experience a lot of what life has to offer, so I don’t feel bad that I’m that way by design.

However, that being said, it has come to my attention that I’m not always easy to read and that my emotions and feelings are not always as obvious as I think they are, particularly in the area of romantic relationships. For a few hours, this totally baffled me. For a girl who you can read disappointment all over her face or will turn the brightest shade of red at embarassment, I thought that this was a ridiculous statement. Most of the time I’m almost over the top with telling and showing people how I feel – I’ve actually believed that I really needed to reign it in, so this almost made me want to ask this guy if he had the right girl.

He definitely did.

After some reflection over the last day or so, I came to the realization that my outward display of emotion and feeling, is a lot of the time different than what’s really going on inside. I feel like a fraud, like I have cheated people out of seeing the real me at some of my most vulnerable times. What have I lost? What have I gained from living guarded? Thank God it’s 2013 and that life didn’t end in the Mayan apocolypse, because it looks like I have some time to work on this!

It is hard, not to mention scary as hell, to put your heart and ego at risk of being burned when fully exposed. Most of the time guarded people have reasons for being protective. I definitely have them – I have had pretty hardcore rejections, people who have taken advantage of my vulnerabilities and some embarassing moments when I decided to share personal things.

In the grand scheme of things, aren’t we all trying to protect ourselves? Getting hurt or rejected never feels good… So aren’t we are all kind of in the same position and it’s not easy for anyone? The guy or girl that you are trying to keep out, is struggling with either trying to get in or put up an even bigger wall. There will be no forward progress if there isn’t a mutual desire to let the other person in.

I met a really great guy…went out a number of times, got butterflies, the works. I was into him and I couldn’t wait to figure out where things were going with us. Time went on and he kind of stopped talking to me, citing a few reasons that I felt were cop outs to something larger. A year later, I find out that he moved on because he didn’t know how I felt and thought I was just not that into him. Great example of something I lost by not letting someone in and not being real with how I felt. I had been too consumed with the fear that I would lay it all out there and it wouldn’t work.

2013 – My promise to myself is to recognize the times when I need to let people in and do a better job of really giving people the Kelly experience. I want people to see the deeper stuff, the real emotions and the unexpected reactions. I can’t do it alone – you have to show me that too. It will be that much better.